Offshoring firms are found to pay higher average wages than purely domestic firms. We provide a unifying empirical approach by capturing the different channels through which offshoring may explain this wage difference: (i) due to change in the composition of workers (skill composition effect) (ii) because all existing workers get higher pay (rent sharing effect). Using Danish worker-firm data we explain how much each channel contributes to higher wages. To estimate the causal effect of offshoring on wages we use China’s accession to the WTO in December 2001 - and the soon after boom in Chinese exports - as positive exogenous shocks to the incentive to offshore to China. Both skill composition and rent sharing effects are found to be important in explaining the resultant gain in wages. We also show that the firm’s timing in the offshoring process determines the relative importance of a channel. For firms offshoring to China in 2002 but not in 1999, only rent sharing explains the gain in wages. For firms offshoring to China both before and after China’s WTO accession the wage increase is explained mostly by the skill composition effect. Moreover, these patterns are not discernible from the measures of skill composition and rent sharing available in typical firm level datasets - like ratio of educated to uneducated workers and sales per employee.

This paper uses a register dataset for the entire Danish population to examine the effect of early
motherhood on labour market measures, health care measures and family measures for the mothers
and their offspring. The dataset is divided into three groups according to the age of the woman at
the time of her first child delivery. Using standard cross-sectional econometric techniques the
results show that very young mothers (aged 16-21) have significantly lower employment rates,
higher propensity to receive welfare benefits and a lower wage income. Children of very young
mothers have a higher family replacement rate, more services received from General Practitioners
and a higher propensity to receive ADHD-medications. The majority of the effects reported are also
significantly greater for mothers who were aged 22-25 at the birth of their first child compared to
older mothers.

The level of progression of an individual’s educational or labor market career is a potentially
important factor for family formation decisions. We address this issue by considering the
effects of a particular college admission system on family formation. We show that the
admission system affects mainly the timing of college enrollment and not the college-going
decision. As such, we consider a specific type of career interruption and its consequences for
relationship formation and fertility decisions. Specifically, we employ a regression
discontinuity design based on the college admission system to estimate the effect of being
above the admission requirement in the year of application on later family formation
decisions. We find that the admission system has substantial effects on the timing of family
formation and, specifically, that the timing of college enrollment is an important determinant
hereof. This suggests that career interruptions such as delays in the educational system can
have large effects on family decision-making.

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We estimate the maximum amount that Danish households are willing to
pay for three different types of insurance: auto, home and house insurance. We use a
unique combination of claims data from the largest private insurance company in
Denmark, measures of individual risk attitudes and discount rates from a field
experiment with a representative sample of the adult Danish population, and
information on household income and wealth from registers at Statistics Denmark.
We assume that households maximize expected inter-temporal utility subject to an
inter-temporal budget constraint with several possible states of nature, where all
uncertainty is realized in the initial period and any loss incurred by an accident is
subtracted from initial wealth. The estimated willingness to pay is based on annual
claims and should thus be considered as an annual premium. Since there is some
uncertainty about the estimates of risk attitudes and discount rates, there is some
uncertainty about the estimated willingness to pay. We use a randomized factorial
design in our sensitivity analysis where each simulation involves a random draw from
independent normal distributions of the estimated risk and time preferences. The
results show that the willingness to pay is marginally higher than the actuarial fair
value under Expected Utility Theory. However, the estimated willingness to pay is
significantly higher under Rank-Dependent Utility Theory, and for some households
it may be up to 600% higher than the actuarial value of the insurance claims.